Evaluating geographic vulnerabilities in networks

In wireless ad-hoc and wireline networks used for search and rescue, military operations, and emergency communications; many failure modes are geographic in nature. They include jammers, explosions, enemy attacks, terrain issues, and natural causes like floods, storms, and fires. This paper proposes two methods to gain valuable insights into the physical topography and geographic vulnerabilities of networks. The 2-Terminal method and All-Terminal method find areas that given a threat of a certain radius can disconnect either the source and destination pair or any component of the network respectively. We believe that these methods could be used to optimize network node selection, placement and design. To be tractable, both methods incorporate innovative search techniques to use the size of the threat to reduce the complexity of the search.